Charactour 5,000 Character Personality Quiz

Submission 8,134

About

Charactour 5,000 Character Personality Quiz is an online personality test hosted by the website Charactour where players are shown pairs of famous pop culture characters and asked which they identify with more regarding a specific aspect of their personality, giving the player a list of characters they're similar to at the end of the quiz with over 5,000 possible outcomes from characters in TV, movies and video games. The quiz also recommends media you might enjoy based on your answers. The quiz went viral on TikTok in early 2022 as users shared their results.

Origin

Kimberly Foerster and Pete McEntegart began work on the Charactour website^[2] sometime in 2013. She posted a video announcing the project to YouTube in October of that year (shown below).

Beyond the quiz, users can also search for characters from various media franchises in their database and read about their personality traits and aspects of their character. In May 2016, Foerster and McEntegart went on Bootstrapping in America to showcase the site (shown below). The site was written about by The Stanford Daily's^[1] Lydia Chen in July 2020 where she interviews the site's creator, Kimberly Foerster, and highlights how the quiz can help people decide what to watch on streaming services.

The site launched in 2015 with 4,500 character profiles. It received media coverage from Variety^[8] and Huffington Post.^[9] By 2022 it grew to 5,500 pages for characters, though only about 1,500 were possible results in the quiz.^[10]

Spread

The first incident of virality was on Tumblr in 2017, where people shared there results. In response CharacTour created a tumblr account where they promoted their quiz there frequently.^[7]

The quiz had its largest viral spike on TikTok in January 2022 as TikTokers^[3]^[4] shared their results for the quiz, often highlighting the most comedic or undesirable results (examples shown below).

On January 12th, TikToker @daddy.issues.com.au posted a version writing they'd "rather be d3@d" than relate to the characters on their list, gaining over 1.1 million views in two weeks (shown below, left). On January 13th, TikToker @asianforhire posted their characters, showing they're similar to characters including Deadpool and Donkey from Shrek, gaining over 1.1 million views in the same span of time (shown below, right).

The quiz also gained viral spread on Twitter^[5] that month as users shared screenshots of their results. For example, on January 14th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user @MariahRoseFaith posted their results, including Seth from Superbad, Lilo from Lilo & Stitch and Willy Wonka, gaining over 180 likes in two weeks. On the same date, PopBuzz^[6] published an article about the quiz.